


Nightingale (In A Golden Cage?)

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [35]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: (because Jason), (this story is about Tim but he doesn't actually appear), Domestic Fluff, Earth-3, Freedom, Gen, Gotham Circus - Freeform, Hugs, Jason Todd was a Talon, Light Angst, Mirror Universe, Owlman is a monster, Past Brainwashing, Tim Drake is Inscrutable, at least the ducks are happy, rescue plans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-19 08:47:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3603864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Fuck," Jason pronounced, slamming a folded newspaper down on the kitchen table. "He's got a new one."</p><p>(It's been four months since Jason Todd defected from the Court of Owls and ran away to join the Circus. Bruce Wayne now has a small, dark-haired ward. Owlman doesn't waste time.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nightingale (In A Golden Cage?)

"Fuck," Jason pronounced, slamming a folded newspaper down on the kitchen table.

"Language," Harley reproved, absently. She was reading a medical journal on her laptop and mashing potatoes at the same time, with predictably lumpy results.

J never bothered twitting the kid about his foul mouth. He'd never heard either Talon swear, so cursing was probably something from before he'd been taken, which meant he approved of it asserting itself, and anyway, life was too short to go around restricting what other people could say. Harl liked feeling maternal, though, and probably worried about Ella picking up some of those words.

He knew this was serious when Jason didn't roll his eyes or even seem to hear Harley, so he turned his back on the sautéing mushrooms and fajitas to give the teenager in the leather jacket his full attention.

"He's got a new one," Jason announced, and handed Jokester the paper. Front page of the society section—after last week's tragic, mysterious death of Mr. and Mrs. Drake of Bristol, Gotham's own Bruce Wayne had stepped forward to take custody of their orphaned son. There was a whole load of twaddle, of course, but the important part was the picture, which Jason stabbed out with one gloved forefinger. "See?"

Jokester saw. There was Wayne, in his usual perfect suit, with his perfect razor-thin smile and a hand on the shoulder of a small dark-haired boy, whose face was perfectly expressionless. "Could he maybe just want control of the Drake company?" he asked hopefully, though not with a great deal of actual hope.

It was still strange, after all these years of hating and guessing, to have had Jason confirm with perfect confidence that Owlman was in fact Bruce Wayne. He'd suspected, of course, more and more, but _knowing_ was something different.

Jaybird shot him a scornful look. "It's a Gotham company." Which meant he already had all the control he needed, and certainly didn't need to disrupt his home life with a child just to gain more. Jason tapped the photo again.

Timothy Drake (10) had blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a dancer's build. "Word on the street is already everyone laying odds whether the kid's a carbon copy getting groomed to take over the empire, or royally fucked in the literal sense," Jason reported disgustedly. "Cobblepot's guys think the kid conspired with Wayne to off his own 'rents. _Something's_ sure different this time, kid in the _papers_. All I know is he's the Owl's _type_." He combed a hand feverishly through his own messy black hair. "No way that's coincidence."

Harley had lost interest in both journal and potatoes some time ago, and now she stood sharply. "Jason," she said, nakedly concerned.

"Not like that." Jason flapped an irritated hand. "Hell knows if he wanted that he could have taken it any time, I've _told_ you." Therapy for a teenager as heavily traumatized and as defensive as Jason was heavy going, and Jokester knew his wife worried her young patient was using denial to cope. He... _probably_ wasn't. Jaybird wasn't really an especially subtle person. "The kid looks like a Talon. _Fuck._ " He kicked the base of the stove, making the pans rattle.

J was nearer than Harley, so he put a hand on Jason's shoulder, light and non-confining. "It's okay, Jay lad."

"I want to hate him," Jason bit out, eyes fixed on the floor. "I want to believe he's this soulless, preppy little demon who signed up for this shit and poisoned his own family. Goddamn rich-ass bastard." He let Jokester pull him into a hug, forehead pressing into the side of a paste-white neck. Didn't return the gesture, but then he never did, never reached out; J was okay with that. He could get hugs from lots of people if he needed them, so he could afford to give as many as he wanted away. "Goddammit."

"It's not your fault, Jason," said Harley, coming around the table. "No matter what this boy's situation is, you are _not_ responsible. Not even a little."

"I _know_ that _,_ " Jason growled. Shoved his way free of Jokester and snatched the paper back. "Wayne does what he wants. We have to help him," he added. Brandishing the photo again. "If he needs it."

J nodded sharply. Harley was right, of course—nothing Owlman did was Jason's fault. But if Wayne _had_ murdered his neighbors and appropriated their son because he felt the need to replace his escaped bird, _they_ were just a little bit responsible. "'course," he smirked. "Piece of cake."

"Dinner is burning, puddin'," Harley informed him.

He saved the fajitas, but saving Timothy Drake wasn't that easy. Getting close to the recently orphaned ward of _the_ Bruce Wayne was hard enough for paparazzi, never mind a band of wanted lunatics, especially since they had to be able to retreat immediately if the boy _wasn't_ a victim, or even if he was and was already too cowed to do anything but blow the whistle on them. They came back to the project repeatedly. "Can't we just wait until he comes to us?" Waylon complained, some eight weeks in. He was the most conspicuous of all of them, even more than J, and he was sick of all the time and effort they kept pouring into plans he couldn't be part of, for the sake of one kid who might be a monster.

"Not a good idea, Croc," said Ed, after a moment of uncomfortable silence.

"Why? We don't even know if he's _going_ to be Talon, but if he is he'll be out here, without all the bodyguards and stuff keeping us back."

Jason made a disgusted sound deep in his throat. "And by then he'll be properly trained. The idea is saving him, Scales." There was a heavy, strangled silence that lasted a few seconds, and then the young Hood pushed away from the scarred table and its annotated Gotham Academy floorplans. "Believe me," the boy who had been Talon said bitterly, crossing the few steps to drop a stack of dinner dishes into the sink, and flicking the tap on so water gushed over grease and carried crumbs away. "He's not sending the new kid into the field until he's already bloody to the wrist."

* * *

 As if Jason had the gift of prophecy, people started dying around Tim Drake. One of his new teachers, first. Dreadful accident, of course, a fall down the stairs. A few weeks later a Gotham Academy bully who'd been harassing the new student killed himself under suspicious circumstances. Then, in the first days of summer break, the boy Drake had apparently been closest to at his old boarding school passed away. Food poisoning.

"You really think he killed his best friend?" Jokester asked, the ripe plum in his mouth tasting like dry wood. Sometimes it was hard even for him to find the joke.

"If he already killed his parents, why not?" Pam shrugged, sprawled over her chair, a wide comfortable thing she had grown out of living vines. Her fortified base in Robinson Park was the safest place in Gotham, but a lot of people found the animated plants viscerally terrifying, which was a shame. "Seems like something a group like the Court of Owls would use as initiation."

Jason hadn't had anyone who mattered to him in the first place, with his mother dead, and no one knew who the first Talon had been, or whether he was still alive, so who could say. "It could just as easily be the Owl taking away everyone he can turn to." That was the _good_ option. How was that the good option?

"True," Pamela allowed. Her big green eyes narrowed on him for a moment. "You're taking this very personally. It seems like half the time I talk to you lately, you're working on this Drake problem."

"Speaking of which, apparently the duck population is spiking…"

"J."

He sighed. Busted. Sucked the last of the pulp off his plumstone and threw it overhand into the underbrush, where it blossomed into a healthy shrub-sized plum tree as he watched. "Jason feels responsible, but he was a kid in a trap. I'm the one who didn't even think about the Owl going for a replacement until it was too late."

"Could you have done anything different if you _had_ thought ahead?"

"Dunno."

Pam rolled her eyes. "I'm telling Harley you're being a moron about this," she threatened. "And yes," she added, settling back a little as she let the subject drop, "the duck population in the Gotham River is improving nicely, because the pollutant reduction initiative everyone helped me with last year has already substantially improved the growth of edible waterweeds and cresses. The molluscs are doing nicely, too."

"That's great, Pam!" J leapt up and went in for a hug. Pam made a grumbling noise, but she hugged him back.

Someday, he thought, taking comfort in the patient pressure of her arms and the clean smells of earth and new plum blossom, Pam would leave Gotham. Back to respectable botany, or letting the League of Shadows recruit her to help regrow rainforest like they wanted, or whatever thing that was really _hers_ she settled on. She was happy enough here, but this wasn't her fight, not really.

It was okay. People left. That didn't always mean you lost them.

"You really do get low just like anyone sometimes, don't you?" Pam murmured.

"'Course I do," J muttered back, a little sulky that she didn't believe this was just a congratulatory hug about molluscs, but not really. "I'm human, aren't I?" He started to let go, hugging accomplished, but Pam didn't let him.

"You're doing fine," she told him, with the kind of confidential whisper people used when they didn't know how to say things like this to other people's faces. "We save people. Didn't you all teach me not to let regret rule my life? What's done is done. Jason is getting better. All you can do for Timothy Drake is give him a chance."

She loosened the hug, then, gripped him by the biceps and held him at arm's length so she could punctuate the pep talk with raised eyebrows. "You hear me?"

"I think I got plum juice in your hair," Jokester confessed, splaying sticky hands, and Pam wrinkled her nose.

"Okay, _that_ you can regret till you die."

(As it turned out, though, the Drake case was something J was going to regret for a very long time.)

**Author's Note:**

> ^^ I decided that 'League of Shadows' was a perfectly reasonable name for a cadre of heroic ecology ninjas. Their mascot is a lemur. And apparently dinner with Jokester and Harlequin sometimes combines mashed potatoes and fajitas, which is weird but probably delicious. (And people keep thinking evil Bruce is a child molester, but I swear he's not. Abuser, yes, obviously. He's kind of equal-opportunity when it comes to abuse. ...oh stars, Villainous Colin Wilkes should be a thing. Eventually. Ahaha.)
> 
> Once again, am curious who thinks this Tim is an ambitious little monster, and who sees him as simply another victim.


End file.
